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While a lot of people want to join the left to react against the mainstream or right, I in many ways react against the left - not a lot of its fundamental commitments, but its often dismal tone, righteousness, defeatism, etc.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Left
Join
Right
Mainstream
Many
Tone
Defeatism
Way
Fundamental
Dismal
People
Fundamentals
Commitments
Commitment
React
Ways
Etc
Often
Righteousness

More quotes by Rebecca Solnit

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Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.
Rebecca Solnit
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The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces] we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic.
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A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.
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The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.
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Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.
Rebecca Solnit
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A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
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Credibility is a basic survival tool.
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....there are three prerequisites to going out into the world to walk for pleasure. One must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints.
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A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.
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The poor have often been subversive just because they don't always believe their own depiction as brutes and loafers and leeches, and new economy is making lots more poor or recognize their fellowship with the insecurity of the poor, the portion of the population for whom the system does not work.
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The subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.
Rebecca Solnit
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We are often in two places at once. In fact we are usually in at least two places and occasionally the contrast is evident....Here, most often, is nothing more than the best perspective to contemplate there.
Rebecca Solnit
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The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
Rebecca Solnit
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Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.
Rebecca Solnit
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Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it's part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the U.S.
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The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes.
Rebecca Solnit
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It's all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane.
Rebecca Solnit
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Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
Rebecca Solnit
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In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.
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The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.
Rebecca Solnit